Successful startup founders can emerge almost anywhere, and a few of the world's most famous entrepreneurs skipped college or dropped out early.
But, for the rest of us, picking the right school is kind of like picking the right path up the mountain -- one could provide lovely vistas and put you on top in no time, another might leave you at the edge of a cliff.
For tech startup founders, there are some guiding lights. For one, as you might expect, attending an ivy league school will make you more likely to find the funds to launch a business. In fact, a new report by PitchBook, a venture capital data-tracking company, shows ivy league schools dominate most of the lists of schools with the most students who went on to become venture capital-based founders.
But once you get beyond Stanford, Harvard, MIT and other ivy league schools, The University of Texas is one of the leading schools in several analysis. It ranked No. 9 for undergraduate programs that produced the most entrepreneurs. It was No. 22 in terms of total funding for the top five companies to emerge from its programs.
UT's top five venture-backed companies in PitchBook's report were Zalora, Freshworks, Casper, Niantic and Apollo Endosurgery (keep in mind UT alumni don't always launch their business in Austin).
UT's MBA program ranked No. 14 -- just above the University of Michigan and Duke, but behind UCLA, UC Berkeley and New York University.
Another standout spot for UT was that it ranked No. 10 for female founders, with 76 entrepreneurs counted by PitchBook and 76 companies.
UT ranked N0. 13 in terms of exits by its undergraduate alumni. But, perhaps the sorest spot for UT is that it didn't make the top 10 in terms of undergrads who went on to build unicorn-status companies. Unsurprisingly, Stanford, Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley led that list.
Finding the right school -- and even ranking them by venture capital raised or the number of founders that emerge -- is a tricky thing. Each set of criteria generate slightly different results.
For example, when Crunchbase looked at the best schools for startup founders last year, it didn't even mention UT. The Princeton Review, meanwhile, gave UT's graduate program a No. 16 ranking.
Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report ranked UT's entrepreneurship program as seventh best for 2018. And Reuters ranked the Longhorns No. 9 on its 2017 World's Most Innovative Universities list.
